‘Downsizing’

Rated: R for language including sexual references, some graphic nudity and drug use.

Runtime: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Stars (of four): ★★★

“Downsizing” is a film with some very big ideas and some rather large ambitions.

The latest effort from writer-director Alexander Payne uses a very clever science-fiction concept to ask us to think about how the combination of our size and just how many of us there are is harming the earth, possibly to an irreversible degree.

In the story, some folks, such as star Matt Damon’s Paul Safranek, undergo a procedure to be shrunken to about 5 inches. As a reward for a decision that will lead to a much smaller footprint on the planet, those who’ve “downsized” are able to live much more lavish lifestyles because their money goes so much further in communities designed for the small.

“Downsizing” is funny, smart and largely entertaining — if, ironically, a bit bloated at more than two hours.

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It is also sort of two movies in one. There’s the zippier, quirkier first third or so that is very reflective of the first full trailer from its studio, Paramount Pictures. Then there’s the larger latter component, which is hinted at more strongly in the studio’s second trailer — which you may want to avoid — and in which Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor are more interested in challenging the audience.

The film begins with a Norwegian scientist enjoying a breakthrough in his lab. Five years later, at a conference dealing with “human scale and sustainability,” that scientist gives a presentation — after it is revealed he has been inside a box, where this tiny man is standing at a tiny podium complete with a minuscule microphone. He advocates a 200-to-300-year transitional phase from big people to versions 0.63 percent the current size, he and similar thinkers believing this is the only practical and humane solution to the planet’s ever-increasing overpopulation problem.

Watching this presentation in Omaha, Nebraska, is Paul, waiting at a restaurant for his carryout order to be ready. He is amazed and can’t stop talking about what he’s seen when he takes the food to the home of his mother, who is ill and dealing with pain.

“The biggest thing since landing on the moon,” he tells his mother. “Bigger.”

A decade later, Paul is living in that same house with his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and the couple is dreaming of a bigger place. However, his job as an occupational therapist — he years ago dropped out of med school to care for Mom — can’t make that dream come through.

The obvious answer is to undergo the increasingly popular shrinking procedure, an idea made more palatable after they run into their friend Dave (Jason Sudeikis), who, much to their surprise, has done so already. (“He never struck me as the kind of guy who’d go and get small,” Paul says to Audrey.)

Later, in the kitchen, where Paul hunches over the counter to talk to Dave (who’s sitting on a box of cookies), the latter scoffs at the former’s suggestion that a big reason to do it is it’s environmentally friendly.

“All that crap about saving the planet,” Dave says dismissively. “Downsizing is about saving yourself.”

When it comes to Paul, as “Downsizing” will show as it winds through its story, it’s about both. Following an extended sequence when Paul goes through the procedure — it’s terrific, by the way, right down to the medical staff scooping the shrunken folks off full-sized medical beds with spatula-like tools and dropping them onto miniature versions — the main story of the film gets underway.

Without saying too much, it involves downsized characters portrayed by Christoph Waltz (“Inglorious Basterds,” “Django Unchained”), as a businessman looking to supply the downsized with goods from the big world, and Hong Chau (“Inherent Vice,” “Big Little Lies”), as a Vietnamese dissident who escaped to the United States inside a television box.

As shaped by Payne and Taylor — a pair that has collaborated on previous films including “Sideways” (2004) and “The Descendants” — that story can be occasionally clunky but is ultimately rich and inventive. Perhaps it bites off a bit more than it can chew, “Downsizing” addressing socioeconomic and other issues on top of those environmental, but you’d prefer that to a film with less ambition.

Damon is quite good, in part because he has better material with which to work than he did earlier this fall in the George Clooney-directed “Suburbicon.” His performance helps sell a rather large dilemma — one that somehow feels both serious and silly, matching the overall tone set by Payne — at the climax of the film.

While Wiig (“Despicable Me 3,” “Mother!”) is memorable in limited screen time — at the risk of giving away too much, she’s particularly fun in a scene with no hair and only one eyebrow — it’s Chau who makes a bigger impression and in unexpected ways. While her character feels uncomfortably close to an Asian stereotype at first, the audience will become invested in the increasingly complex Ngoc Lam.

Payne is a critical darling, and that isn’t likely to change with “Downsizing,” which shows him at his most creative. And while he doesn’t have all the answers for the issues he raises in this film, he does leave you with a message that resonates.

That’s a big-enough accomplishment.

‘Downsizing’

In theaters: Dec. 22.

Rated: R for language including sexual references, some graphic nudity and drug use.

About the Author

Mark is a lifelong Northeast Ohioan and an Ohio University grad. Along with loving music, movies and television, he is crazy about sports and tech. Reach the author at mmeszoros@news-herald.com
or follow Mark on Twitter: @MarkMeszoros.